MOTION CONSTRUCTIONS IN L2 SPANISH LEARNERS’ ORAL PRODUCTION: A LONGITUDINAL STUDY
Restricted (Penn State Only)
- Author:
- Khoruzhaya, Yulia
- Graduate Program:
- Applied Linguistics
- Degree:
- Doctor of Philosophy
- Document Type:
- Dissertation
- Date of Defense:
- April 10, 2024
- Committee Members:
- Paola Migliaccio-Dussias, Outside Unit & Field Member
Robert Schrauf, Major Field Member
Kevin McManus, Chair & Dissertation Advisor
Xiaofei Lu, Major Field Member
Tommaso Milani, Program Head/Chair - Keywords:
- motion events
second language acquisition
Spanish
usage-based approaches
longitudinal - Abstract:
- This dissertation examined second language (L2) speakers’ use of motion constructions, defined as associations of a form (e.g., verb + noun) with the meaning of a physical movement from one point to another in space (e.g., El chico salta la valla ‘The boy jumps over the fence’) or in the same location (e.g., El chico salta sobre la cama ‘The boy jumps on the bed’). Motion is a basic aspect of our everyday lives and plays a crucial role in everyday communication between speakers. Therefore, all human languages are thought to be able to express motion. However, languages do not always describe motion events in the same ways (Cadierno, 2020; Hijazo-Gascón, 2021). For example, English and Spanish differ in how they pair form (e.g., verb, preposition) with semantic components of motion (e.g., Path or the trajectory of movement). In English, Path is typically expressed outside of the main verb through prepositions (e.g., goMOTION downPATH), whereas, in Spanish, Path is usually mapped onto the main verb (e.g., bajarMOTION+PATH ‘go down’). Due to these crosslinguistic differences, expressing motion constitutes a well-known learning difficulty to L2 speakers (Cadierno, 2017; Muñoz & Cadierno, 2019). However, little is known about the extent to which L2 use of motion constructions changes over time and what factors affect this learning. This is because previous research has prioritized cross-sectional study designs to compare different learner groups at one point in time (Barkaoui, 2014). As a result, previous studies have not explored the individual and joint effects of different input and contextual variables on L2 learning and use of motion constructions over time. This is a notable limitation because L2 language learning is known to be a nonlinear process with a high degree of inter-individual variability and shaped, individually and collectively, by a multitude of factors (Evans & Larsen-Freeman, 2020; Verspoor et al., 2021). To address this gap, a longitudinal research design was used in this study to investigate (i) the emergence and use of motion constructions in the same L2 learners over time; (ii) the influence of input- (motion verb input frequency, verb-construction association strength, and verb semantic prototypicality) and learner-related factors (L2 proficiency, exposure, use, and network size) on L2 use of motion constructions; and (iii) the changing role of these factors (if any) on this learning. Thirty-one English-speaking university learners of Spanish enrolled in basic Spanish language programs in the northeastern US performed three oral production tasks (a picture-based narrative task, a video-based narrative task, and a verb production task) at four-week intervals over the course of a 16-week-long semester. Participants also completed a Spanish elicited imitation test (Ortega et al., 1999) to assess their L2 proficiency and a questionnaire to collect information about their Spanish learning experience (L2 exposure, L2 use, and L2 network size). In addition, an input corpus was created from instructional materials to document and measure input-related variables of motion verbs (input frequency and verb-construction association strength) in the participants’ speech samples. Semantic prototypicality of these verbs was determined via L1 Spanish speakers’ judgments of the degree to which a verb matches the core meaning of a motion construction. Results showed that the overall token frequency of motion constructions significantly increased over time. Additionally, distinct and nonlinear patterns of change were observed for different motion constructions, indicating that constructional development can be associated with progress and attrition. Finally, input-related variables were found to be predictive of the frequency of use of motion constructions in the learner data, whereas no significant effect of learner-related variables was observed. Taken together, the study’s findings not only underscore the need for simultaneous investigation of group trends and individual variation together to capture the complex picture of L2 constructional development over time, but they also have significant implications for usage-based approaches to language learning, L2 materials design for teaching motion constructions, and longitudinal L2 constructional research.